Among the Great: The Passing of VS Naipaul, a literary legend
Among contemporary English writers, few can match the stylistic skill or acerbic substance of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-2018).
Naipaul, who would have turned 86 on 17th August, died a few days earlier, on Saturday, 11th August. He left behind an enviable, if controversial, literary legacy that few can aspire to equal, let alone exceed. Also a reasonably well-recorded personal history that few would wish to emulate or admit to, peppered as it was with adultery, spousal and partner abuse, irascible temper tantrums, nasty feuds with friends, penny-pinching stinginess, elegant, even affable manners, and occasional bouts of generosity of spirit.
The end of a long tale: Paul Theroux helps push VS Naipaul's wheelchair @ZEEJaipurLitFes pic.twitter.com/Rj9cOtLoej
— William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) January 24, 2015
Naipaul’s life may be seen as falling into two uneven parts - thirty five years of struggle, followed by fifty years of success. His early years are marked by desperate exertion and toil, not only to get through Oxford after flunking his BLitt, almost having to return to Trinidad after failing to survive in London as a writer. These years coloured his vision of both himself and the world. What defined him, even saved him, was his unswerving devotion to his vocation, combined with his belief, bordering on monomania, in his own singularity as a writer.
He also believed in the value and, ultimately, justice of the modern, universal, scientific-material, rational Western civilisation, with its respect for letters, of which he considered himself a part. This civilisation in turn showered him with its highest and most coveted honours. These included the Booker Prize awarded for In a Free State (1971), a knighthood conferred in 1990 by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature, and the 100th Nobel Prize for literature announced on October 11, 2001.
Naipaul was hated by many, but admired by more critics and readers than almost any other peer. He was routinely accused of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, in addition to peddling stereotypes and half-truths about the “third world.” He travelled widely all over the world, documented broken or half-formed societies and nations, offering his unsparing, politically incorrect, but brutally honest commentaries on both individuals and communities.
Many considered his account of Islam to be particularly invidious, if not odious. He famously declared, “There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs,” and that Islam “had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.”
Yet, I believe, he was ultimately wrong; the threat to the world came not from the converted part of the Islamic world such as Iran, but from its very heartland, Arabia, where Al Qaeda was born, and its legionaries, the Taliban, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
His masterpiece was A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), undoubtedly one of greatest novels of the century. It is a modern epic of exile, loss, and partial recovery, the story of a near-comic protagonist’s struggle to be, quite literally, accommodated in a difficult, almost hostile, world, is actually a political and poetic allegory of the travails of the entire Indian diaspora of indenture and displacement. Almost a modern Ramayana, it places an anti-hero at its centre instead of the ideal maryada-purushottam Sri Rama.
Biswas is also about the survival and spread of Indian civilisation, a theme that obsessed Naipaul as a part of his quest for his own identity. This book makes a very important contribution not just to the Naipaul oeuvre, but to our understanding of how a modern writer is made. In Naipaul’s case, apart from the remarkable powers of observation and recall, the carefully honed, sharp-edged and precise craftsmanship, an overweening prejudice and harshness of vision that also fashioned the other masterworks that he went on to pen. Naipaul is unfair, opinionated - but always readable.
My own defining Naipaul moment came unexpectedly.
I was invited to meet him and Nadira, Lady Naipaul, along with a small group of writers and intellectuals in Delhi. The meeting, on 26 February 2004, was in the most unlikeliest of venues, the BJP party headquarters on Ashok Road, at the fag end of the NDA Government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. After a rather brief, not to mention, disappointing address, preceded and followed by many flowery encomiums by political rather than literary luminaries, there were some sparking bon mots: “Do you justify the demolition of the Babri Masjid?” he was asked. “Yes, I did justify it... I have done it many times,” he returned, without batting an eyelid. “Is the BJP trying to appropriate you?” another asked rather predictably, if aggressively. “I don't mind it,” Sir Vidia smiled wickedly.
And I had almost given up on the possibility of a meaningful afternoon!
After the public meeting and interaction, Lady Naipaul announced that Sir Vidia would be willing to meet some of us. We lined up to pay our homage, getting a minute or two each. I had carried two of his books, A House for Mister Biswas (1961), his masterpiece, and a hardback of Among the Believers (1981), the first of his searching, some would say, scathing, portrayals of Islam. After confessing how much I admired his writing, I fished the books out, requesting him to autograph them.
Naipaul, a rather short man, drew himself to his full height of 5’5” or so, and announced rather haughtily, “I only sign new books and only hardbacks.” Neither of my copies qualified. I opened the somewhat battered Biswas and showed Lady Naipaul the certificate pasted on the flyleaf: “The MM Bhalla Prize awarded for securing the highest marks in First Year BA English (Hons.) 1978, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.”
Lady Naipaul exclaimed, “Vidia, he’s carried this book all over the world for over a quarter of a century; how cute!” Naipaul’s face thawed in a remarkably warm smile, the ends of his narrowing eyes accentuating the creases and crowfeet, “Oh well, in that case….”
Whipping out his expensive fountain pain, he signed with a flourish.